The online gaming industry in China is big business with market research firm, iResearch, predicting that revenues will reach CMB31.1 billion (US$4.5 billion) by the end of 2009 and growing to CMB68.6 billion (US$10 billion) by the end of 2012. With so much at stake, four employees of a Chinese online gaming company launched a denial of service attack against its competitors that resulted in widespread Internet outages across six different provinces in the country.

Authorities say that having suffered numerous denial of service attacks from rivals itself, the [unnamed] company decided to launch an attack on a location domain name server (DNS) registrar DNSPod, which served many of its competitors.

When DNSPod’s servers were overwhelmed, it began routing traffic to [China Telecom Corporation Limited’s ((ADR) NYSE: CHA)] servers, whose subsequent failure caused Internet outages in six different provinces of the country.

According to PC World, the future of domain names in China that use the English alphabet is gradually going to be replaced by the two Chinese characters for “China”. The country’s chief domain registration agency, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), claims that it has solved the technical issues related to deploying the Chinese-language domains and expects that all mainstream websites in the country will adopt the in-language top level domains within the next two years.

The next step is for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet’s chief regulatory organization, to adopt an updated plan that introduces Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) for top-level country domains in local languages. If the plan passes, then global root servers by next year should support the Chinese-language version of the country’s top-level domain.

China has the most Internet users in the world with 338 million and the adoption of in-language domains is likely to be a tremendous undertaking. Besides having to make sure that companies with the English-language domain are ensured the rights to the Chinese version, the CNNIC must also make sure that domain registrants receive ownership of the domain in both traditional and simplified Chinese.

Traditional Chinese is the language used in Taiwan and Hong Kong while simplified is used in China and Singapore. In effect, Chinese websites will need to maintain at least three separate top level domains, “.cn”, “中國” (traditional) and “中国” (simplified), in order to ensure that Chinese speakers worldwide will have equal access.

This time, it seems a little more real… TechCrunch is reporting that a Chinese news portal has disclosed a deal between Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and China Unicom Limited ((ADR) NYSE: CHU) to bring the iPhone to China in October.

Chinese users will get the iPhone 3G with 8GB for $365 with a 2-year contract and a monthly rate of $27 (minimum). The Wi-Fi function will be disabled initially but may be added in the future, along with China’s homegrown WAPI (WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure) standard.

No word yet on the iPhone 3GS for China, but this may happen very soon, too. 163.com already shows [Google machine translation] a picture of what appears to be a Chinese model with a specific serial number (A1303) reserved for the 3GS.

We first reported the news of Apple and China Unicom purportedly coming to an agreement to bring the iPhone to China, the world’s largest mobile market, at the end of July. (link below). This is the latest turn of the rumor mill. Current speculation is that the formal announcement will come in the next few days from Hong Kong. We’ll bring you the details once it’s confirmed, as the iPhone rumor mill in Asia is quite active. Still, with this news being so potentially huge for the mobile market and Apple, it’s worth keeping tabs on.

Although senior Yahoo execs haven’t commented yet, it’s probably apparent to them that Alibaba.com Limited (HKG: 1688) has made its “Sophie’s Choice”, announcing yesterday that it would strip its classifieds business, Koubei.com, away from its media and lifestyle portal, Yahoo China, and merge it into its online shopping portal, Taobao.com. It was only a little over a year ago that Alibaba had announced the merger of Koubei.com into China Yahoo to bolster the portal’s e-commerce offerings. Now China Yahoo, sans Koubei, will re-focus on its email, content and search services.

Taobao.com

This reversal is a clear commentary on which of Alibaba’s biggest Internet properties it has more faith in. In September 2008 the company launched its “Big Taobao” strategy — backed by up to RMB5 billion (US$731.5 million) in new investments over the next 5 years — which aimed to build the website into China’s dominant e-commerce platform. At the same time Alibaba has been aware of the declining market Read the rest of this entry »

Gomez, Inc., a leader in Web application experience management based in Lexington, Massachusetts, announced yesterday that an increasing number of leading Chinese brands are selecting Gomez solutions to test, monitor and optimize the performance and availability of their Web and mobile applications for end-users across China. Spanning industry leaders in Chinese e-commerce, communications, video, sports, travel and technology, Gomez’s growth is highlighted by both new and expanded relationships with organizations including: